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Typing With Your Brain
destinyland writes "This article asks, 'Why bother to type a document using a keyboard when you can write it by simply thinking about the letters?' A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can 'type' using just their minds. The study involved electrocorticography — a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of the brain after a surgical incision into the skull. ('We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy,' explains one Mayo clinic neurologist.) And besides typing, there's new brain wave applications that can now turn brain waves into music and even Twitter status updates — by thought alone."
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but I can think of a whole lot of ways where broadcasting what I'm thinking could be highly, ah, embarrassing.
typing *without* your brain might be more convenient.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
yes, because what we need is more twitter.
whenever i hear about groundbreaking advancements in the neurosciences, i for one automatically think about how it can improve my twitter feed.
sigh.
Amazing. Why there are no(*) downsides at all! This will sweep the world!
Soon we will all use this, and the keyboard will be dead. Imagine what computers could look like without the needing keyboard. Almost like... tablets of some kind. We'll call them "portable blackboard computers".
(*) Only known downsides:
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
And Electrodes in the brain.
Right...
It is by will and electrodes in my brain I set my mind in motion.
I can't think 120WPM, but I can sure type it.
I'm curious as to whether or not this will be able to help patients with locked in disorder. Recently in the news there was an story about a man who had been "locked-in", unable to communicate with others for nearly 20 years. The Science-Based Medicine blog did a big write up of this story (http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3122) and some of the inherent problems with the way in which they made contact with the patient "facilitated communication". If the accuracy rate is truly as good as claimed this could really be a huge help for individuals who are otherwise unable to communicate with the outside world, a considerably step up from the blink once for yes, twice for no based communication standard. (though if you knew binary code you could be a much more effective blinker)
I only speak for myself here, but it seems like thinking about letters is actually harder than typing on a keyboard. I don't really think about what letters I'm pressing when I type, I just think of the words and the vast majority of the time, it's just muscle memory doing its thing. Perhaps for novel words or words that I don't quite remember how to spell, I'll think of the letters individually. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth.
Further, it's not entirely clear that our cognitive capacities reside solely in our brain. The rest of our body could have a role to play in cognition. It could be the case that when we're typing, a big part of our typing cognitive process actually depends on our body executing typing actions. For more info, see Embodied Embedded Cognition, Enactivism, and other related philosophy of mind or AI theories.
if I had to think of each letter, I would probably forget what I was thinking in the first place
You could write it down so you won’t forget it...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Is there such a thing as a sticky key when you are thinking about it?
Youuuuuuuuu do know what I am talking abouuuuuuuuuuut, right?
> I already thought Twitter required more filtering between brain and
> keyboard, but now this?
It's Twitter. No need to involve the brain at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I wonder why they didn't try something like Dasher. This uses simple two-axis control to choose letters as they fly by. I would think this kind of method would be better than having to train for each individual letter.